I hope you enjoyed Part 1 of my reading of “Horses Don’t Eat Moon Pies.”
Today’s installment—Part 2—finishes the essay. In this episode, Conroy writes about the group he calls “the DuPonters,” those Yankees and other non-Southerners with their PhDs and slide rules and a copy of Consumer Reports hanging out of their back pockets, who moved to Aiken throughout the 1950s and 60s to staff the Savannah River Plant. What he says about the DuPonters is mostly true, from my perspective, though I personally never heard anyone refer to them by that name. We would always just say “he works out at the site” or “she’s worked out at SRS for years” and everyone would immediately know exactly what you were talking about. That remains true to this day, though I would venture to say that working at the Savannah River Site doesn’t carry quite the same stigma it did when I was growing up in the 1980s or a decade earlier when Conroy penned this essay.
Besides the Winter Colonists, the Old Aikenites, and the Duponter transplants, there are two other groups Conroy identifies in Aiken’s hidebound hierarchy of money, blood, and dynasty—or lack thereof, as is more often the case. There are the old Blacks (though he doesn’t capitalize the word as is standard now) and the Valley people (which he does capitalize). If you listen to today’s episode you’ll hear that Conroy describes these underprivileged groups with a brazen frankness that could very well get you into trouble today, but that was considered “authentic” writing at the time. Yes, he also drops the n-word at one point. (No, I do not say it in my reading.)
What he says about Black people in Aiken is mostly true, from my experience. The reason there weren’t very many young Black people in Aiken in the early 1970s is because they got the hell out, realizing how few opportunities there were for them in a South still mostly segregated in all but the most pro forma ways. (It could also be that there just weren’t any Black people who wanted to talk to Pat Conroy—a thought that never fails to bring a smile to my face. Note the way the Black woman he interviews in today’s episode completely blows him off in the nicest possible way.) Today, a lot of that has changed, thankfully, though there are still subtle and not-so-subtle dividing lines throughout the city of Aiken that speak to racial injustice then as now, mostly of an economic variety.
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For example, in the downtown residential core of Aiken, which is where I grew up, the blocks where the white folks live typically have nice, well-maintained sidewalks. Not so on the blocks and streets populated mostly by Blacks. In fact, in many of the Black neighborhoods, even in the city core, there are no sidewalks at all. There are strict lines dividing the parts of town that are white and those that are Black. And that’s fairly typical of small Southern towns even today. It’s the little things that make the big things even more noticeable.
When I was in middle school, there was a big push to start bussing kids around the city to different schools. Why? The vast majority of the affluent white children—the kids of the DuPonters—lived on Aiken’s south side of town, so South Aiken High School—made semi-famous via a random T-shirt seen on Stranger Things—had become overwhelmingly white. The other high school in town, Aiken High School (my alma mater—go Hornets!), needed more white students. It was in danger of becoming a de facto Black high school. So, they started bussing kids all over town to re-jigger the racial make-up of the two local high schools.
In retrospect, it was a good idea, and I am glad that the powers-that-be in Aiken County Schools had the foresight to do this in the early 1990s. (It feels like the sort of thing you’d never get away with today—and you’d end up on some hysterical Fox News segment just for trying.) In fact, there was a lot of this bussing going on around the South in the 1990s to try to even out the very kinds of racial and economic disparities that Conroy writes about. But at the time there was wailing and gnashing of teeth and rending of clothes and all the Biblical reactions you’d expect in a small Southern town like Aiken. “Why do I have to bus my kid across town 20 minutes just to go to school when there’s a perfectly good high school right here!?” That sort of thing.
What Conroy writes about the Valley people is spot on. If the symbol of Aiken is the horse, and all the regal connotations of that princely animal, then the symbol of the Valley is the humble Moon Pie. Cheap, available everywhere (including especially gas stations), and just filling enough to sustain baseline caloric activities.
The Valley was a depressed place in the early 1970s and it’s a mostly depressed place now. My mother grew up in the Valley, so I have to tread carefully here. But the thing about the Valley is that it probably has more in common with any other rural place in South Carolina that you’d care to mention; what makes its poverty and general lack of social advancement noteworthy is that exists in such stark contrast (and in such close proximity) to Aiken, a city of unusual wealth and privilege—at least for the chosen few.
Here’s Conroy on the politics and anti-union tendencies of the people of the Valley in a passage worth quoting at length:
A religion as deeply rooted as Christianity rules the mill-haunted roads of the Valley. This faith, an echoing gospel etched in the blood of the American labor movement, is a truculent, feral hatred of labor unions. It lies as deep in the consciousness of the Valley as the kaolin mined in the hills above Horse Creek. Over the years, a vast propaganda campaign has convinced the mill workers of the Valley that unions are synonymous with godlessness, communism, and loss of jobs. Union organizers in the twenties entered a hostile viper’s nest when they tried to organize the Valley. The mill owners prevailed.
The Mill is a father and his mutely obedient children live in the long rows of shotgun houses, each house a reflection of the next house; each village a chimerical walk through a hall of mirrors where there are no grotesque images, no distortion of features, but only the chilling repetition of a false start, and evil conception. The houses stretch like rosary beads for twenty miles. And somehow, in this cloacal anachronism back to the days of sweatshops and milltowns, you realized that the people of Horse Creek Valley are at war with a terrible enemy: the people of Horse Creek Valley. Politically, they are suicidal.
What’s striking to me about this passage is how you could take much of what Conroy says about the anti-union Valley then and apply it to much of the South’s economic politics now, especially outside of the largest cities. There’s a reason global corporations like BMW and Firestone have moved their manufacturing operations to South Carolina over the last quarter century. Your average Sandlapper has never tasted a union, has no experience of it, and so as far as they’re concerned, they have no use for it. All they know is that Tucker Carlson and the multi-millionaire down the street don’t like unions. So they don’t either.
Ultimately, it wasn’t organized labor or communists that drove the textile mills out of South Carolina after 150 years of economic dominance. It was a combination of human error and an act of God. A freak train derailment in 2005 that made national news spelled the end of the Graniteville Company, the corporate body that ran the textile mills along Horse Creek since the 19th century. Before there was New Palestine, Ohio, there was the Graniteville train wreck. The payouts bankrupted the company and the mills went away. After a century and a half of economic peonage, the people of the Valley were free from Father Mill.
This sudden shift in the primary economic engine of the Valley forced the moment to its crisis, in a manner of speaking, and as Aiken Standard columnist Jeff Wallace put it,
[Conroy’s] disparaging remarks about the Valley would have to be altered greatly were Conroy to see that part of the county today. Gone are the mills that for more than a century provided the economic muscle for what we now call Midland Valley. Horse Creek has been cleansed of its toxic deposits with its water today nearly pristine. Those who made their livelihoods in the cotton mills now work making tires or are entrepreneurs establishing their own businesses and going into the professional world.
The Valley today has improved. The off-brand gas stations and video stores and Baptist churches of my youth—well, they’re still there (not the video stores, of course). But there are shiny new developments and some of the old mills have even been turned into luxury apartments you can rent for the princely sum of $1650 per month for a one bedroom. (This one comes with a view of a patch of pine forest and a mound of red kaolin.)
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Links for Further Reading
* You can find the full text of “Horses Don’t Eat Moon Pies” at this link, then scroll down for some comments from locals on the essay that are rather enlightening.
* Jeff Wallace’s column on the essay from June 25, 2021 can be found here.
* “Centaurs Eat at Cracker Barrel,” a 2014 essay by Aiken native Alexander Lumans, is a 21st century update, of sorts, to “Horses Don’t Eat Moon Pies.” It’s well worth reading.
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